The recalibration of history in 2016

New Delhi, Dec. 29 -- On 25 December 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as president of the Soviet Union. Its flag was lowered for the last time; the following day, it was formally dissolved. The end of the 20th century's defining conflict was anticlimactic. When the Soviet Union passed into history, it did so with the weary air of a guest who had overstayed his welcome-not the brio expected of Ronald Reagan's "evil empire". This was not surprising. It had been teetering at least since the wave of anti-Communist revolutions across Central and Eastern Europe called the Autumn of Nations-a melancholy moniker for a signal achievement-in 1989, and the fall of the Berlin Wall at year's end. That achievement and the events around it signalled the approaching fall of communism. And that summer, Francis Fukuyama published "The End Of History?" in The National Interest.
A quarter-century later almost to the day, Fukuyama's prediction of the final triumph of liberal democracy and free market economics in the realm of ideas seems very much a product of its times. The 2008 financial crisis and its lingering aftershocks kick-started an examination of capitalist models; the political spillover inevitably followed. 2016 has been the year in which these politico-economic and cultural currents have begun to crest.
At the end of a year that has seen Brexit, the election of Donald Trump with his inward-looking vision for the US, and gains for European politicians selling economic and demographic nationalism, it would be easy to conclude that Fukuyama was comprehensively wrong. But in the face of the triumphalism and angst that have, respectively, greeted and condemned the year's political shifts, some perspective would be useful.
For all that Fukuyama's thesis was immediately condemned for its historical determinism, it also accurately reflected-or predicted-the default world view of the developed world for the two decades that followed. This was a world view that considered essential political and economic debates settled and saw politics and policymaking as primarily concerned with instrumentality. In Fukuyama's words, the focus areas were "economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands". The US' war on terror did not disturb this calculus; Islamic terrorism is obviously an aberration, not a serious contender in the realm of ideas.
The various ways in which this world view was mistaken seem obvious in hindsight. There is China, of course-its economy slowing, but with no sign on the horizon of the collapse of the one-party system that many had predicted would be inevitable once the state began to free the market. There is the continued failure of Western-style liberal democracy to take root in the countries where the US and its allies have tried to impose it this century. As Shadi Hamid points out in Islamic Exceptionalism: How The Struggle Over Islam Is Reshaping The World, this is not surprising; the historical interplay of religion, government and culture in West Asia makes it unlikely that democracy in the region, if it does take hold, will evolve along the same lines as its Western counterpart. There is, most importantly, the rebellion against mainstream orthodoxies in Western democracies that 2016 has thrown up.
And yet, the consternation that has greeted the year's political touchstones has been excessive in its own way. The 1930s have become a popular reference point; the rise of fascism in the US and Western Europe has been bemoaned. This thinking falls prey to the same linearity that undermined the end of history argument-the adherence to Hegel's notion of history as a grand dialectical process where ideologies clash in a struggle for the survival of the fittest. The messy reality of 2016 is that it has been more a year of internecine political warfare. The conflict that has been resolved in favour of Trump and Brexit has taken place within the framework of liberal democracy. It is unlikely in the extreme that either winning faction will shatter that framework. The pendulum may swing towards greater nativism or protectionism, but these are part of the natural political cycle; Western democracies have seen them before, and the pendulum's swing back to the other side as well.
What, then, is the takeaway from all the tumult 2016 has seen? Simply this: The year has served as a timely reminder that if liberal democracy and free market economics are to hold fast-as they should, for there are no competing ideologies and economic models that can contribute to public and individual well-being in similar fashion-then the complacent assumption that they do not need to continuously recalibrate and reassess their direction and modes of implementation must be shaken. As they have been-and that, in the long run, is not necessarily a bad thing.